Cruel intentions: how toxic tabloids and celebrity culture changed the way we talk about mental health

All In The Mind

ABC

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you opened up a magazine in the 2000s, you'd likely be met by countless images of celebrities on their worst days. And the conversation accompanying those images? Pretty toxic.

We've come a long way in how we talk about mental health since then, but how did we get here? What changed?

Today, we reflect on the cruelty of tabloid culture and how the internet shifted the narrative about mental health.

If you want to hear more about our relationship with celebrities, check out our episode Moog became a Youtube megastar — and it messed with his mental health.

Guests:

Jo PiazzaAuthor and host of Under the Influence

Sophie GilbertStaff writer for The AtlanticAuthor of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

Dr Jessica FordLecturer in MediaUniversity of Adelaide

Professor Nick HaslamUniversity of Melbourne

Clinical Professor Jonathan ShedlerDepartment of Psychiatry and Behavioural SciencesUniversity of California

Hadley MearesHollywood historian

Matthew SuarezAuthor of Paparazzi Daze: Celebrity Encounters

David KampContributing EditorVanity Fair Magazine

Credits:

Presenter/producer: Sana Qadar
Reporter/producer: Jennifer Leake
Producer: Rose Kerr
Senior producer: James Bullen
Sound engineer: Simon Branthwaite

Transcript

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0:00.0	ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07.7	There's a lot to keep up with, and that's where QuickSmart comes in.
0:12.2	Each week I chat with my cleverest colleagues about all the things you've been wondering.
0:17.4	Like, a dictator's taking over the world?
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0:31.1	week. I'll be quick, you'll be smarter, it's quick smart. Find us on the ABC listener.
0:40.6	For a few years now, there's been a lot of reminiscing about the early 2000s, the Y2K
0:46.5	fashion, the music, and nostalgia for what pop culture looked like before social media.
0:52.4	But we've also been reckoning with a darker side of the naughtys, how young female stars
0:57.5	were treated back then.
1:01.1	What typified that era was a kind of cruelty, but also a kind of circus of cruelty and a delight
1:07.2	in cruelty, what we were witnessing was people really having quite public struggles
1:12.4	with mental health, with addiction, with disordered eating and other such things. And we were
1:18.0	sort of conditioned to think of this as kind of just part of celebrity. I'm Sana Khadar. This is
1:24.8	all in the mind. Today, reporter Jen Leek is taking us back to the celebrity tabloid culture of the 2000s.
1:31.5	And she's tracking the evolution in how we talk about mental health today. Hey, Jen.
1:37.3	Hey, Sana. I am going to start us off with a question. Have you heard of the 20-year nostalgia rule? No, I haven't. What is that?
1:46.1	Basically, it's the idea that popular culture tends to recycle and romanticise the trends and
1:53.0	fashions of roughly two decades earlier. So if we think about 1970s nostalgia, that took off in the 1990s. Yes, with the bell bottoms. Exactly. And we're in the
2:04.4	2020s. So now it's all about the 2000s. Yeah, I'm so terrified at when I see young people today
2:10.9	wearing the stuff I wore when I was in high school. I can't believe I'm old enough to say that's what
	...

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